Threshold Time provides an introductory survey of the cultural, social and political history of Mexican American and Chicano literature, as well as new in-depth analyses of a selection of works that between them span a hundred years of this particular branch of American literature. The book begins its explorations of the "passage of crisis" with Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don, continues with Americo Paredes' George Washington Gómez, Tomás Rivera's ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, and ends with Helena María Viramontes' Under the Feet of Jesus and Benjamin Alire Sáenz' Carry Me Like Water. In order to do justice to the idiosyncrasies of the individual texts and the complexities they embrace, the analyses refer to a number of other texts belonging to the tradition, and draw on a wide range of theoretical approaches. The final chapter of Threshold Time brings the various readings together in a discussion circumscribed by the negotiations of a temporality that is strongly aligned with a sense of memory peculiar to the history of the Chicano presence in the United States of America.
